Frozen

It goes against the grain. I do not come to Paris to eat frozen food. But I have and it was good. My American hostess, long married to a Parisian, has brought down the house with her souris de veau and everyone wants to know where she bought the meat and how she made the sauce. She hesitates. Later, she explains her hesitation: telling the truth might cause strife in her marriage and cost her husband a few important clients. But she yields. The veal shanks and the sauce came frozen in a box from Picard. Everyone asks for seconds.

Marriage and career saved. This might be a good slogan for Picard, a chain of about 500 stores that sell frozen food and only surgelés. It is, more to the point, saving the marriages and careers of all the Frenchwomen who are working, do all the cooking, and are getting frazzled. Perhaps this is why one of the brands at Picard (which chiefly sells under its own name) is called Évasion Cuisine or Cooking Escape. Understood.

But frozen foods have always seemed to me the most American of eats. They were invented by Clarence Birdseye who figured out how to freeze fish when working for the United States government in Labrador in 1920. This was not news to the Inuit and the Innu who had lived there for millennia and eat fish as it is thawing, but it was amazing to Americans who loved his frozen fish and peas. Of course they did. Frozen foods are convenient, require shopping less often, let us eat anything out of season, and do not challenge the palate with flavor and texture.

This is not what I come to Paris for, frozen veal shank. But the food was so good—it had flavor and texture, and the sauce was complex. What should I think? I think I should admit that I need to see Paris as it is, not as I would like it to be. That’s the ticket. Like lots of Americans who like Paris and think they know it, I have to admit that what I know is incomplete and sometimes distorted by ginned up, gussied up memories of something I couldn’t possibly remember because it was never there or never happened or came before my time.

Picard has put me to the test, and I want to pass it. It is here, real, and successful. And, to my relief, unlike anything I have ever seen in America. Years ago, small American towns used to have frozen food lockers because almost no one could afford a freezer at home, and the odds are they were stocked with more frozen deer meat from hunting season than with Clarence Birdseye’s products. But the lockers are gone. Nowhere will you find a store devoted entirely to keeping food frozen in Washington, let alone the small towns. But you will in Paris, right across from the Panthéon. Imagine that.

I don’t have to. It’s there. And it’s like nothing in the States. Picard’s stores are small, having nowhere near the capacity of the frozen-food aisles of a single, ordinary American supermarket. They don’t need to be because they do not stock things like frozen tacos, pita sandwiches, and corn dogs. Strictly meat and potatoes—and fish, shellfish, green vegetables, and astonishing desserts. Picard does not want to sell everything imaginable, only foods compatible with its formidable technology.

And the freezers are not the same either. They are not upright, showing off all the colorful packaging at eye level. They are freezer chests which means the shoppers are all bent over as if picking crops. I like this, not for any symbolism I might wring out of it, but because it is different from the way we shop for frozen foods in America. This helps.

Another distinction to ease my pain: Picard is clinical if not sterile. A friend who has become a regular Picardiste tells me he lived in Paris for a year before he ventured into one of the stores, thinking it was so dauntingly bare and white because it must be something medical, maybe having to do with stored corpses. The American supermarket is a competition for the eyesight of the customer—color everywhere, signs, flashing LEDs, video screens, and (oh, yes) the food. The walls are white at Picard. The few signs distinguish for the shopper the location of the crustaceans from the location of the chocolate cake.

I’m feeling better already. Picard is French, and no mistaking it. It does not have the promiscuous intensity of a French food street, like Rue Daguerre, or the elaborately simple elegance of the food hall in one of Les Grands Magasins. It is something new, a generation or so being new enough in Paris, but still French. I’m learning to love it.

I still like the streets with food vendors lined up on opposite sidewalks, and will miss them when they are gone. And they are going. The butcher shop, greengrocer, and alimentation on a street near the Luxembourg have surrendered to a tea room, florist, and hairdresser. The same may be true of the peripatetic markets that make their rounds, as the milkman used to do, stopping here on Tuesday, there on Wednesday, and on and on, repeating every week.

But if their days are numbered, whose aren’t? Let’s hope for a long count and that we accommodate to each other as we change. That’s why I come here. And besides, even if we no longer have the charcutier and the marchand de légumes, we’ll always have Picard. And Paris.

© Joseph Lestrange